News
Local

Former Grand Bend teacher wins Alice Munro top prize

When Marlan Siren was in Grade 12 she won a national essay-writing contest. Earlier this month she won another – and a big one – the short story contest at the Alice Munro Festival in Wingam.

Siren, who wrote Plates Don't Fall, was the first-place winner of the Alice Munro 13th annual Literary Short Story Competition for Emerging Writers. The competition is an annual opportunity for writers to explore the short story, a literary art form made popular by 2013 Nobel laureate Alice Munro.

Siren’s story tells the tale of a young man selling off the contents of his apartment. Everyone who comes to take away an item has their own story to tell. And the protagonist finds himself overwhelmed by these stories.

“The process for this piece has been long,” Siren admitted in an interview.

After finishing school in Toronto Siren became a high school English teacher in that city’s downtown and an “alt-teacher of hippy types for the Toronto Learning Annex, where I taught poetry writing and screen writing.”

In the late 1970's Siren wrote the provincial education ministry’s curriculum for the Grade 13 writer’s craft course.

Then life brought her to Grand Bend and to a teaching position at South Huron District High School in Exeter.

“Through all this I continued to write pieces that were going nowhere but into my shoe box,” Siren said. “I was spending soul-grinding time marking writing, so I had little time to work on my own products.

“After retirement, my poems were printed in various publications, and that was swell.”

Siren retired from teaching in 2010, and unearthed some old bits and pieces of her own writing.

“This story skeleton, about a minimalist lifestyle, was there. I decided to craft it. As I always told my students, writing is easy, re-writing is the bitch. So, no, I did not write this specifically for the contest. But here's the cool thing about writing contests in literary quarterlies and elsewhere – they have word count criteria. That word limit helped me make crafting choices.”

Siren said she will continue to write.

Although she retired from teaching seven years ago, she said for the past 34 years she has held a second job as a “property owner/manager of a downtown Grand Bend accommodation business.”

As for winning the award: “Of course, winning the Alice Munro prize is amazing. She is amazing. She is my hero.”

Celebrity judge Merilyn Simonds, author of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, announced the winners. “And in First Place, Plates Don’t Fall, a miracle of tightly drawn character and plot that stretches language to its limits as it reaches for the boundary of loss. A stunning winner,” she said.

SUBHED: Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story writing competition winners: